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Following Internet users in order to find out their preferences is not something new. Maybe they did not wore fancy names like predictive or behavioral targeting, but this phenomenon exists even since the appearance of Netscape in 1995. Behavioral targeting gathers data from the internet user to search for information that can create a pattern of the things he likes. In the other hand, predictive targeting is designed especially for the ones that cannot be traced due to the fact that they visited your website or tried to search down your most important keywords. Even if those people did not proceed so, that does not matter because they can be the ideal customer type you are looking for.

Differences regarding contextual marketing

Some may say that both of these techniques resemble contextual marketing, but it is not quite so. Contextual marketing is using only the recent activity of a user within a web-browser, but one person can search for quite an amount of things in the internet, so these results may not always be the best. . But this way of gathering information is rather general, so we all have the need of procedures that are more performant and more effective when it is about finding new customers for our business. To see what the matter is about check the two points below:

Behavioral targeting instead use the well-known “cookies”, which are small data packages that stick to a consumer hard drive. These cookies are present there all time and gather all the information needed about the preferences of the customer, like his favorite webpages, the content of an online shopping cart and other data, like the geographical location of the consumer. All these primary data is used to create a customer profile and online companies can find the niche of customers they are looking for.

As for predictive targeting, it is using programmatic platforms that have within profiles of a huge number of users. Following a certain pattern these platform can identify the attributes that are most relevant in one’s profile, to decide if the person is prone to reacting to your products or advertising.

Which one is the best for e-commerce business?

Behavioral targeting can help you set a profile of customer that can be more opened to the type of products you are selling and predictive targeting can help you reach the customers that are usually outside your area of reach. Since it is much easier to track the clients that already visited your website, it may prove to be more difficult to find the ones that do not even know you exist. So maybe predictive targeting is the one that should catch your attention if you own an e-commerce business. And why so? Because it can reveal to you that number of customers that are not in your reach. This is the secret of constantly increasing your customer numbers and the way to perpetuate your business. For sure this is a technique that will be very much research in the future, to increase its performances.

The tools that can help your business

As a technique, behavioral targeting has its specific tools that were specially developed to make everyone’s activity easier. Just check them in the points below.

This is a software that you can find for free. It has a great use because it creates user profiles in real time, meaning that it gathers info in the exact time when the visitor is on your website in order to create customized offers. It works with the help of the “cookies”, that were mentioned before.

This specific software will create the profile of a user by the way he moves on the website. This means this tool will record data like used keywords or items that were clicked on to find out preferences. This gathered info will then help in creating personalized banner and offers related to the choices that user has made previously.

This one is a company that has its activity in the area of understanding the intentions of a potential buyer, in the way that if one spends a bit more time checking a certain item, then they are prone to receive an immediate discount for that certain products, based on the fact of an increased interest of the visitor for that item.

Targeting strategies and mobile apps

Although behavioral and predictive strategies are domains with a large potential and that will still be developed in the years to come, they can already be seen and are used in the mobile app marketing. These techniques are used to promote new released apps, with the help of email installed on a customer smartphone or tablet. If you want to release a new app for example, you can use behavioral targeting to understand the profile of your consumers, thus you will be able to develop an app that is more engaging for them and you will also find a way to make them complete a full registration on your website. You have to be aware that these techniques, no matter if you have a business on a website or you want to get launched in mobile app business, these techniques will help you keep track of you potential customers and, most of all, to understand their preferences, thus you are able to tailor products and service according to these preferences, managing to create a solid customer portfolio.

Do you have any tools and recommendations? Please feel free to share as a comment.